Scott Paul Johnson

Black History and the Guitar | Travis Picking/Cotten Style

Added 2020-07-20 13:00:04 +0000 UTC

In light of the ongoing protests against police brutality and systemic racism, I feel that now would is an especially important time to dig into a few history lessons about black musicians in the U.S.

In this article, I'm going to focus on "Travis Picking" - a fingerpicking style credited to Merle Travis - and how it should probably be credited to black guitarists like Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, and Arnold Shultz.

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This channel is first and foremost about learning guitar, but we cannot talk about guitar in this country (the U.S.) without talking about the history of guitar, and we can't talk about the history of guitar without talking about Black history.

I want to bring light to one particular aspect of music history: how this one style of guitar first popped up on the scene via African American musicians and firmly rooted in a Black style of music and is now named after a white musician who played the style a good 20-30 years after it was first recorded by Black guitarists.

Music history is weird and there is rarely one specific person who is responsible for a specific style, but in this case there is a clear progression of artists who played this style before Merle Travis. Like much of history, music history is prone to "whitewashing."

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First off, there is variety of ways to explain what "Travis Picking" means, but for now I'll describe it like so:

Travis Picking is: using your right hand thumb to establish an alternating bass line, typically centered around roots and fifths, and using your right hand fingers to play melody and rhythm parts.

Here is a clip of Merle Travis himself in the 1950's performing I'll See You In My Dreams.

The style is named after Merle Travis, a white guitarist, but he did not invent it. Travis credited Mose Rager and Ike Everly (father of the Everly Brothers) with teaching him the style, and they both learned it from Arnold Shultz, born in 1886 in Kentucky, the son of a formerly enslaved person. Unfortunately, there are no known recordings of Arnold Shultz, who died in 1931. However, another black guitarist named Mississippi John Hurt recorded "Travis Style" guitar tunes in 1928, when Merle Travis was just 11 years old. It is unclear wether Shultz or Hurt knew of each other, but they were both playing a version of "Travis style" well before Travis.

Listen to all of Mississippi John Hurt's 1928 recordings on spotify, or find a playlist on youtube.

The earliest known "travis picking" song is "Freight Train." It was written by Elizabeth Cotten, a black musician born in 1893. She played guitar with an alternating bass line and melody - but she played it left handed on a right handed guitar, which meant that she played melody with her thumb and the bass notes with her fingers. Although the technique is different due to her upside-down style, it sounds and functions like Travis picking.

As a teenager, she wrote a number of tunes, including the fingerpicking staple "Freight Train." She quit playing publicly except at church for about 25 years until she became a housekeeper for the Seeger family, who loved her music and recorded her performances.

Mississippi John Hurt's 1928 recordings were commercially unsuccessful and he went back to sharecropping, an unjust system that was very much like slavery in the post-Emancipation south. He occasionally played parties and dances in his small town of Avalon, Mississippi.

In the 60's folk music became wildly popular and Pete Seeger became a well known musician. He began inviting folk musicians as guests on his TV show, Rainbow Quest. Two of those guests were Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt. Both artists hadn't been performing for about 25 years and were suddenly thrust into the spotlight in the 60's.

These performances by Hurt and Cotten are some of the most beautiful videos I've ever seen.

John - How he learned to play guitar - Amazing story of how he got started

John - You've Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley

John - John Henry

Elizabeth - Freight Train - this is not from Rainbow Quest, but sometime in the 60s

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Here is something even more odd - when people refer to a technique as Travis Picking, generally they are referring to a style more like something Hurt or Cotten would play than the style Merle Travis actually played. Both Hurt and Cotten tended to play specific and single notes for their alternating bass lines while Travis adopted more of a pick strum pick strum technique for his alternating bass lines. On top of that, Merle travis only used his thumb and index finger, but "travis picking" songs typically use index middle and ring fingers to grab notes that harmonize with the melody - which both Hurt and Cotten did.

These days, when people say a song uses "Travis Picking," they are often more accurately describing Hurt and Cotten's styles than the actual style of Merle Travis.

I didn't write this article as a slam against white people or a jab at people who call the style "Travis Picking." I just wanted to point out how a man in the 1940's and 50's was credited with a guitar style that Black musicians had pioneered in the 1910's and 20's AND that when people are talking about Travis Picking, they are often talking about something that isn't like what Travis himself played.

When I listen to the radio and hear classic songs like Landslide, Dust in the Wind, The Boxer, and even more modern songs like Let Her Go and Such Great Heights, think about how those songs may not have existed without the styles of Black artists like Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, and Arnold Shultz.